


A New Kind of Communication

by tartanfics



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Injury, M/M, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-01
Updated: 2011-07-01
Packaged: 2017-10-20 22:30:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/217773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tartanfics/pseuds/tartanfics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock texts, Sherlock leaves notes, Sherlock phones John, and he never really says anything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A New Kind of Communication

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cathedral_carver](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cathedral_carver/gifts).



> Written for [Holmestice](http://holmestice.livejournal.com/), June 2011. All the beta credit to the best beta that ever beta’d, miss_sabre.

John hears about the accident via text message.

He’s just getting off work at the surgery on a Wednesday afternoon, wondering whether he should pick up food on his way home, when his mobile vibrates. He pulls it out of his pocket, expecting it to be Sherlock.

It’s Lestrade instead.

 _Sherlock hurt. St. Bart’s._

“Bloody--little more information, please,” John mutters at his phone. He presses speed dial 4 for Lestrade, and listens to it ring out as he starts walking towards the end of the road to find a cab. When Lestrade fails to answer he rings Sherlock’s phone, but that goes straight to the voicemail. “Answer your bloody phones,” John says, startling a passing pizza delivery man. “Sorry.”

-

 _Concussion. He’s done something to his ankle,  
not sure what. Should be all right.  
L_

The relief John feels when he read this message while trying to pay the cab driver is shocking in its intensity. He shoves too much money into the man’s hand and then stumbles back towards the doors to the hospital, clutching his phone and his wallet and trying not to drop everything.

-

 _John, I need the book that is sitting on the kitchen table.  
SH_

 _The book about London trees.  
SH_

 _I need to look up which species of trees are most common in Soho.  
SH_

 _For the case Lestrade is working on.  
SH_

 _John?  
SH_

 _Doctors ought not to leave their patients unattended.  
SH_

He has a broken ankle and a bruise the shape of Germany on his ribs. John knows it is the shape of Germany because he walked in to Sherlock’s bedroom one morning to see him lying on the bed, pulling his t-shirt up to get a look at the bruise. “It reminds me of something,” he said. “Get me the atlas.” John sighed, but he went to get the atlas.

“Definitely Germany,” Sherlock said, glancing between his own chest and the colourful map of Europe.

So now every time John sees anything about Germany in the newspaper or hears a pair of German tourists talking in the street, he thinks of the way Sherlock’s fingers looked shoving his shirt up to bare the skin of his ribs.

Every time John thinks of that, though, he thinks of the ugly purple bruise and the broken ankle and the way Sherlock looked at him while he was doped up on painkillers.

 _how do you know anything about Lestrade’s case?_ , John finally answers.

 _did you bribe someone to bring you the case file?_

 _If you don’t bring me the book I need I will attempt to get it myself.  
This will probably result in injury.  
SH_

 _first bribery and now blackmail. hang on, coming downstairs._

-

The evening after they let Sherlock come home from the hospital, John doesn’t want to leave him alone. He gets Sherlock upstairs and into bed, lying flat on his back in the middle of a tangle of blue cotton sheets. Sherlock is drowsy and loose-limbed, on a painkillers for his ankle. He sprawls across the bed and looks up at John, smiling lazily. “Hello, John,” Sherlock murmurs.

“Hey,” John says around the scratchiness in his throat. He sinks onto the floor with his back against the side of the bed, tilting his head back and taking deep breaths.

“John?”

“Hmm?”

Sherlock doesn’t answer. John turns his head, cheek against the sheets, to look up at Sherlock. Sherlock is looking at the ceiling.

“M’ foot hurts.”

John closes his eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“Are you going to do something ‘bout it, John?”

“Yeah. Go to sleep, Sherlock.”

“No. Have to solve the case.”

John snorts. “Yeah, good luck.”

“Jooohn.”

He feels Sherlock moving around behind him, and then Sherlock’s hand scrabbles over his shoulder and into his hair. John can feel the shape of Sherlock’s long thin fingers, and the way they pull lightly at his hair is pleasantly soothing. “What are you doing, Sherlock?”

Sherlock hums wordlessly and moves John’s head back and forth. John, eyes closed, tries not to think too hard about Sherlock’s fingernails.

Later, remembering the press and pull of Sherlock’s fingers, John is forced to attribute the action to the drugs.

-

 _I want to watch television.  
SH_

“So come in here and watch it!” John shouts in the direction of Sherlock’s open bedroom door.

Silence. John waits a moment to see if Sherlock is going to text back, and then calls, “I’m not coming in there to help you get up. You should learn to use the crutches.”

 _No.  
SH_

John turns the telly on, just loud enough that Sherlock can hear the noise but can’t make out any of the words.

After half an hour of palpable sulking emanating from Sherlock’s room, John goes to stand in his doorway and stare at him. Sherlock is sitting up in bed, folding a paper aeroplane.

“Were you going to throw that at me?” John asks, crossing his arms over his chest.

“You weren’t answering my texts. I didn’t have any carrier pigeons.”

“Do you normally send messages by carrier pigeon?”

“It is a not unheard of occurrence.”

“You could have just come out to the lounge and I wouldn’t have needed to answer your texts. Besides, I did answer them. Just not in text form. Sherlock, you can’t just sit here until your ankle heals. And I’m not going to be a convenient leaning post every time you want to go somewhere.”

Sherlock is wearing pyjamas, without even the usual extra layer of his dressing gown. His hair is a mess and he looks miserable. John watches as he finishes folding the paper plane, delicately flattening the edges. When he throws it, it hits John almost painfully in the centre of the chest. John catches it as it falls, and looks at it. It is more complicated than your average paper plane, and it’s beautifully folded, all crisp edges and even corners.

“What did you learn to fold paper airplanes for?”

“Boring lectures at school. The trick is to make them so they turn, and it looks like they came from a different part of the classroom.”

John laughs. “No one ever caught you while you were folding them?”

“Of course not.”

“Did you actually write a message on this? I’m not sure I want to unfold it.”

“I can always fold another.”

John unfolds the paper, flattening it against the door until he can read what it says. It’s written in blue ink, in what John thinks of as Sherlock’s _real_ handwriting. When he writes anything he expects other people to read, he changes his handwriting, depending on what he wants the other person to know about him, who is going to read it, what character he’s playing. When he writes notes only for himself, or for John, his handwriting is a thin scrawl, sharp and jagged.

John’s never noticed before, the fact that Sherlock uses his real handwriting for him. Sherlock doesn’t have much occasion to leave John notes.

Despite the contents of the note, John looks at the curve of the _f_ and feels warmth curling around his stomach.

 _Crutches are uncomfortable and undignified. I will sit here until my ankle heals and catch up on my reading. Feel free to deliver tea and biscuits at regular intervals._

John grins, and attempts to refold the plane.

"Do you really want to watch telly?"

"'Want' is perhaps not the most accurate term. Television sounds marginally less dull than any of my alternate options."

John takes pity on him, and helps him out to his chair in front of the telly.

-

John still doesn't know how it happened. Lestrade was on the other side of the building they were chasing a suspect around, and didn't see anything, so John can't ask him. John considers ringing Mycroft and asking if he knows, or can look up the CCTV footage of the area, but that seems a bit excessive. So John watches the way Sherlock moves around his injuries, and quietly wonders.

He begins to suspect Sherlock is embarrassed. He's rarely seen Sherlock embarrassed, and he's not really sure about the times he thinks he has. Sherlock's emotions are a maze behind a very high wall, and though sometimes John manages to poke holes in the wall, he only sees little, confusing pieces of what's behind it.

He knows it bothers Sherlock to need help with things. John is still working, so clearly Sherlock is capable of taking care of himself for a few hours, but movement is nevertheless a problem.

John wonders, briefly, what it means that Sherlock minds needing help, but prefers John's shoulder to the independence granted by the crutches.

-

Sherlock's injuries are a mystery, and they soon become a point of contention.

One day Sherlock is sitting on the sofa when John accosts him with a stethoscope. "You've bruised your ribs, I want to listen to your chest."

"My chest is fine."

"I want to make sure."

Sherlock sets aside the newspaper he's reading and glares up at John. "There is such a thing as being excessively careful, John."

"There is such a thing, yes. Come on, take off your shirt."

Sherlock's lips twitch. John feels his face flush a little, but he refuses to back down. Then Sherlock seems to consider his options, and chooses the path of least resistance. He pauses, clearly looking at the colour in John's cheeks, which no doubt makes them brighter, and then pulls his t-shirt over his head in one slow smooth movement.

John eyes the bruise, low on the left side of Sherlock's ribs. Sherlock is surprisingly muscular for how slim he seems and how little he eats. Until John saw him shirtless, he imagined Sherlock with ribs visible against his skin. Not that John's been picturing Sherlock naked, of course.

"Does it hurt much?" John asks, sitting down on the coffee table. He presses his thumbs to the edges of the bruise, fingertips resting against Sherlock's stomach. Sherlock winces. "When I press down?"

Sherlock takes a slightly shaky breath. "To the touch. If I turn too suddenly."

John slots the stethoscope into his ears and blows on the end to warm it. Sherlock watches the process, wrinkling his nose distastefully. "Would you rather have it cold?" John asks, seeing his face. Sherlock doesn't answer.

John sets the end of the stethoscope over Sherlock's heart and listens. After a moment he takes hold of Sherlock's wrist to look at his watch and count his heart rate. Sherlock lets him, arm moving limply to angle the watch face in the right direction. Once satisfied, John moves the stethoscope to the other side and repeats the process. Then he moves downwards, listening to the sounds of Sherlock's body underneath his Germany-shaped bruise.

Finally he sits back, satisfied everything is more or less as it should be. Well. Sherlock shouldn't be bruised, and his ankle shouldn't be broken, but you can't have everything.

"This bruise is such a weird shape, Sherlock. It would help if you--"

"No."

John hooks the stethoscope around his neck and frowns, looking at Sherlock, who crosses his arms over his chest. Maybe it's a defensive gesture. Maybe he's just cold. John's never known him to be self conscious.

"It's not--" John's not sure what he wants to ask, but Sherlock shakes his head.

"No."

John's eyes linger on the bruise for a moment, but he forces himself to turn away. "Fine. You'll be fine."

"Of course I will," Sherlock scoffs, but it sounds almost reassuring.

-

They’ve been doing the grocery shopping together since Sherlock’s injuries.

It’s not really as domestic as it sounds. It’s not as if Sherlock would go anywhere near the shopping, normally, except to demand periodically that John buy biscuits. Technically he doesn’t even go near the shopping now. But apparently he’s so bored that even talking to John on the phone while John’s at the supermarket is better than staring at the ceiling or trying to read one of the books sitting in the precarious pile next to his bed.

The first time it happens, John is in the cereal aisle. His phone starts playing some obnoxious pop song that Sherlock put on his phone in a fit of vengeful boredom. John doesn’t know how to change it.

The phone rings and John answers it as quickly as possible, embarrassed. “Hello?”

“John. Good. Don’t forget the milk.”

“Sherlock? I won’t forget the milk, it’s on the list.” He looks around at the colourful boxes of cereal and hopes no one has a sudden need for cornflakes. He hates people who talk on their mobile phones in shops.

“A shopping list, how quaint. Put pickled gherkins on it.”

“Pickled--what are those for?”

“Experiments.”

“You’re lying in bed, how are you going to run experiments on gherkins while lying in bed?”

“Trivial details,” Sherlock says, and John can just see him waving a dismissive hand.

“Fine.” John walks to the end of the of the aisle and starts looking for the gherkins. “Do you need anything else?”

“Lubricant.”

John chokes.

“Please don’t tell me what you want that for,” John mutters. He finds the gherkin shelves and starts trying to figure out which variety Sherlock wants. “What kind of gherkins?”

“What’s the selection?”

“Uh... cocktail gherkins, sweet and sour, crinkle cut...”

“Which are the biggest?”

John really, really doesn’t want to know. “Sweet and sour, I guess.”

“Buy those.”

“Fine, okay.” A woman turns onto the aisle, and John smiles a little awkwardly at her. She’s motherly and sensible-looking, and John hopes Sherlock won’t have any more awkward requests for her to overhear. He turns away as she starts browsing the mayonnaise, and asks, “Are we done? Can I go back to my shopping now?”

“Wait. I also need chocolate sauce, rubber gloves, prawns, frozen blueberries, and a meat tenderiser.”

“You--what could you possible do with all that? You’re lying in bed, you can’t even cook, and I’m not cooking prawns for you. Are you seriously going to eat chocolate sauce and gherkins?!”

“Of course not. I have already explained this, John. I have experiments to conduct.”

John heaves a very deep sigh. “Fine. Fine, I will buy all of that, and I will bring it home and you will no longer want it, and it will sit in the fridge and grow mould. Fine. Bye.” He hangs up before Sherlock has a chance to add anything to his list, and puts a jar of gherkins in his basket.

“Cravings?” John whirls around, and realizes the woman looking at the mayonnaise is talking to him.

“Sorry?” John asks, confused.

“Pardon me, I just overheard your conversation. Is it cravings?”

“Well, I guess so,” John says dubiously. “Of a sort.”

“I remember craving veal and rice pudding. You must be very patient, buying all those things for your wife. How far along is she? Is she on bed rest?”

John turns profoundly crimson. “Oh, it’s not--”

“Oh, don’t worry, dear. Girlfriend?” She smiles and reaches out to pat John’s arm. He turns, if possible, redder.

“No, I, no, just my, er, friend.”

Something about the way he says friend seems to tip her off to some imaginary shade of meaning. John winces.

“No baby?”

“Uh, no.”

Her face falls, as if the shrinking prospect of being able to coo over a doting father-to-be has spoiled her entire afternoon.

“Sorry?” John offers.

“What did he want the gherkins and chocolate sauce for, then?” she asks, rather accusingly.

“He’s a bit... weird,” John says delicately. “I assume he’s not actually eating them together.” _I hope._

“Right. Well, have a nice day.” She moves away rather quickly, not even taking any mayonnaise.

John is left staring at the gherkins, wondering what just happened.

-

When John gets home, Sherlock is lying on his back holding a newspaper over his head, reading the personal advertisements. John knocks on the door jamb with the meat tenderiser. Sherlock flicks the edge of the paper aside and looks at him. “Well?”

“Got your prawns.”

“Excellent. In the freezer, please.”

“Next to the ears?” John asks, deadpan.

“Perfect.”

John goes to put the shopping away, and then comes back to lean in Sherlock’s doorway again. There is a long pause, while Sherlock affects not to wonder why John is looking at him, and John wonders if he should bother bringing this up.

“A woman in the shop assumed I was shopping for my wife’s pregnancy cravings.”

“I’m the wife in this scenario?” Sherlock asks, without looking away from his newspaper.

“Yeah. Really, it did look a bit weird having lube and chocolate sauce and a meat tenderiser in my basket all at once.”

“No harm in shopping for multiple occasions simultaneously. Everyone does it.”

“Right.”

“Did you get the crinkle cut gherkins?”

“Sherlock!”

“What?”

“You asked for sweet and sour!”

“So, I changed my mind. The experiment works better with crinkle cut.”

 _He might as well be my pregnant wife,_ John thinks, giving up on the entire situation.

-

Six months ago, Sherlock looked at John, took a breath, pointed a gun at a bomb, and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

Sure, there was a _pop_ and a lot of billowing black smoke, but the deafening sound of explosion never hit their ears. The red lights against their chests winked out, and Moriarty disappeared into the mist. There has been no word of him since.

John thinks it’s a bit funny that Sherlock should be so lastingly injured in the course of an ordinary case, when _shooting a bomb_ left him unscathed.

-

Late one night, John is holed up in his bed with his computer, avoiding Sherlock, when a chat window pops up. He hadn’t been aware he had any kind of instant messaging program (he’s not very good with computers). He’s already turned off his phone so Sherlock can’t nag him via text, so it’s a bit of a disappointment to realize Sherlock has alternate methods of communication that involve neither the phone nor the impossibility of stairs.

Sherlock has, by this time, gone a little stir crazy. This is actually not much different from his normal fits of boredom or his mid-case mania, but his immobility is forcing him to depend on John for entertainment more than usual. So John is hiding from Sherlock, who last he checked was lying on the sofa shooting rubber bands at the ceiling and talking about paint pigments. John slipped out when Sherlock got to yellow ochre, and he’s not even sure whether Sherlock noticed.

 **Sherlock:** John, are you avoiding me?

John bites his lip, feeling guilty, and annoyed at himself for feeling guilty. Then he really looks at the little blue chat window, and notices that there’s an icon next to Sherlock’s name with a little picture of a magnifying glass. There’s something strange about the idea of Sherlock instant messaging.

 _Sent at 11:03 on Saturday_ , the chat says, and John realises he’s let an awkward pause stretch out between their computer screens.

 **John:** Just tired. In bed.

Sherlock will inevitably see through this lie, but it makes John feel better to deny the accusation.

 **John:** Where did this thing come from?

 **Sherlock:** What thing?

 **John:** This message thing. Didn’t know it was here.

 **Sherlock:** One ought to learn to use one’s tools properly.

 **John:** Can’t be bothered, sorry.

 _Sent at 11:08 on Saturday_

 **Sherlock:** Close attention to paint pigments has been the deciding factor in several of my most interesting cases.

 **John:** I’m sure it has.

 **John:** And it’s really amazing how much you know about them.

 **Sherlock:** Are you pacifying me, John?

 **John:** No

 **John:** I’ve stopped bothering.

 _Sent at 11:15 on Saturday_

John, half asleep against his pillows, watches the words on the screen blend together.

 **Sherlock:** John?

John rouses himself enough to answer.

 **John:** I was just tired, really.

 **Sherlock:** Finally got tired of me, did you?

 **John:** Don’t be an idiot.

 **John:** Of course not.

 **Sherlock:** Go to sleep, John.

 **Sherlock:** I will endeavour to be less of a bother to you.

 _Sherlock is offline. Messages you send will be delivered when Sherlock comes online._

John blinks at the screen. Did Sherlock just apologise? Through instant message? John wonders if he’s dreaming, then gives up, snaps the laptop shut, and burrows into his blankets.

-

When John gets up in the morning, he always wants a cup of tea first thing. It is a disappointment, therefore, to reach into the refrigerator and pull out a completely empty milk carton. On the side of the carton, covering up the nutrition facts, is a post-it note. _BUY MILK_ , it says.

Sherlock doesn’t usually leave notes. If he wants something, he demands it as John is heading out the door, or sometimes just as he comes in with the shopping, or, as they have recently discovered, over the phone while John’s at the store.

“Sherlock!”

John shuts the refrigerator and steps out of the kitchen, looking for Sherlock. He finds him sitting on the sofa, laptop on his knees, headphones in his ears. He’s playing some kind of classical music so loudly that John recognises the tune, though he can’t name it. John looks from the pale purple post-it on the milk to Sherlock on the sofa, and gives up on the question.

The next day, however, John finds another purple post-it note. This one is stuck to the bathroom mirror, and says, _You forgot to floss your teeth_.

John thinks back to his bedtime routine the night before, and realises he did, in fact, fail to floss his teeth.

It’s not surprising that Sherlock knows this, of course, but it worries John a little that Sherlock has been reduced to making deductions about the state of John’s dental hygiene.

Sighing, John peels the note off the mirror, tucks it in his pocket, and pulls the dental floss out of the cupboard.

Two days later John comes home from work, flops down in his armchair, and opens his laptop. Stuck to the keyboard he finds another purple note. _Delete your internet history._ John’s stomach lurches suddenly leftwards. He crumples up the note, and takes a moment to be profoundly grateful that Sherlock is not in the room.

The notes continue, and grow more frequent, so that a few days later John starts finding green post-its and realises that Sherlock has managed to use up the purple ones.

The notes range from the demanding-- _Move your lettuce before it contaminates my experiments_ , on the front of the fridge, to the random-- _Heart, shopping, head in fridge_ , on the wall above the sofa, to the practical-- _Watch out for mould experiment_ , on the cupboard above said experiment, to the observational-- _You had lunch with Mike Stamford_ , on the kitchen table. John doesn’t mind much. Anything that keeps Sherlock occupied is welcome, especially something as innocuous as post-it notes. John has taken to collecting the notes, putting them in his pockets and then emptying his pockets into the drawer of his bedside table, which is quickly filling up with loose squares of paper. He isn’t entirely sure why he does this, since half the notes are incomprehensible and the other half are irrelevant once moved.

And then there are the notes that John...wonders about.

Most of these John has found stuck to the lid of his laptop, presumably because Sherlock knows he is certain to find them there. Unlike some of the notes, these are very obviously directed at John.

 _The blue jumper is less offensive to all of us who possess an aesthetic sensibility._ This seems to be a suggestion, but when John reads it he bites his lip and wonders--did Sherlock make the suggestion because he thinks John’s other jumpers are ugly, or because he particularly likes the way John looks in the blue one?

 _7 pm. Mediocre television. Bring home Chinese._

 _Don’t go to work tomorrow._

-

John stumbles down the stairs one morning, feeling bleary, and finds Sherlock sitting on the sofa, staring intently at the doorway. He could be staring at John, since John is standing in the doorway, but John’s not certain Sherlock’s really seeing him.

“Huh?” John says, too sleepy to be coherent but too confused to be silent.

Sherlock’s eyes abruptly focus. “You’re going to the surgery today,” he says. Something about John’s appearance has obviously tipped him off to this fact, and he doesn’t sound pleased.

John rubs at the corners of his eyes. “Are we about to have an argument?”

“No.”

“Can I make tea first?”

“If you must.” John nods, and, yawning, shuffles into the kitchen. He makes their tea mechanically, relying on muscle memory not to pour boiling water over his hands. Considering toast he prods at the bread, but finds a post-it note on it: _Past the date. Do not bin._ So much for that idea.

He hides in the kitchen until the tea is finished steeping, despite the worrying silence emanating from the other room. The kitchen is slightly less of a horrible mess than usual, since Sherlock hasn’t been able to move around it in quite so much of a human tornado as he is wont to do. John pulls a couple more post-it notes off various surfaces, stuffing them into the pocket of his dressing gown, and stacks several plates in the sink, all of which have crumbs and vague hints of jam glued to them. John hopes Sherlock hasn’t been subsisting on nothing but toast and jam.

By the time the tea is ready the kitchen looks positively tidy, though John knows this is never a lasting state. He takes a deep breath and carries the two mugs of tea out to Sherlock. (He always makes two, now.)

Sherlock is sitting in exactly the same position John left him, slumped forward and gazing vacantly toward the door. John sets Sherlock’s mug on the coffee table and nudges his shoulder. “What’s up?”

John sinks down onto the sofa next to Sherlock. He’s already mostly awake by the time he takes his first sip of tea, but the warm liquid seems to clear not only the passage down his throat but the way up to his brain as well.

“I would prefer it if you did not leave the flat today,” Sherlock says, picking up his tea and staring into it.

“Why? I’m not staying home just to keep you entertained.” John sips at his tea and attempts to flatten his hair. He always feels strange sharing the sofa with Sherlock. Usually they’re either both sitting in their chairs by the telly, or Sherlock is splayed out over the entire sofa, or Sherlock’s not home and John has made a tentative venture into the pleasant squashiness of the sofa. They’re never both there at once. John tries to make himself comfortable and not slide towards the dip in the centre, where Sherlock is.

“It would simply be better if you did not go out today.” Sherlock makes an attempt to shove his fingers down the side of his cast and scratch, and then he gives up the effort and runs his hand through his hair. John blinks at him, trying to work out the meaning hiding in the words.

“Sherlock, if I don’t work we’ll have no money at all, since you can’t work. Somebody’s got to pay for all the random food you keep telling me to buy.” He gets up, prepared to dismiss the idea of staying home, when Sherlock speaks again.

“In the interest of my... peace of mind. Do not go to work.”

John pauses, standing in the small space between the sofa and the coffee table, looking down at the top of Sherlock’s head. _Is he... what is he asking? Does he want...? No, of course not. Just bored._ “Right, sorry, patients to see. I’m going to go get dressed.” And he takes his mug of tea, steps around the coffee table, and goes upstairs.

-

The morning passes in a blur of colds, flus, and minor aches and pains. John enjoys the monotony of examination, diagnosis, prescription, harmless chat, though he, like Sherlock, is beginning to feel impatient for more excitement to hold the balance. At lunchtime he eats a sandwich at his desk and reads the paper.

He is just cleaning up his crumbs and getting ready to go back to work when his mobile vibrates.

 _John?  
SH_

 _yes?_

No answer. John puts his phone away and goes back to work.

At half past three John shows a patient (woman, 32, sore throat) out of his office, and sees Sarah talking to a man by the front desk. Nothing strange about that, really. She is obviously explaining a prescription to him. It’s not as if John is jealous. They’ve been cheerfully just friends for months now, a slow and gradual lapse that neither really minded or commented on. Anyway, John--well, he has other things on his mind.

That’s not what catches John’s attention. Neither is it the man’s appearance--a fraction taller than Sarah, unremarkable brown hair, skin on the pale side (not as pale as Sherlock), slender, wearing a blue t-shirt and grey trousers. He glances around, apparently just looking at the decorations on the walls, the other patients in the waiting room. It’s not the way he looks or the way he’s talking to Sarah that catches John’s eye. John doesn’t know why he feels cold, alert, and just a little guilty.

But he does.

He tells Patty at the front desk that he needs a quick break, and goes into his office, locking the door behind him. Working on instinct, he scans the room, then sits down behind his desk and takes out his mobile.

INBOX

 _John?  
SH_

John stares at his phone’s screen, trying to decipher what answer Sherlock was looking for. His mind jumps from the text on screen to Sherlock’s request this morning--”In the interest of my peace of mind, don’t go to work.” Maybe it wasn’t Sherlock’s boredom talking. Maybe it wasn’t Sherlock wanting... something. Maybe there really is something disturbing Sherlock’s peace of mind.

John chews on his lip for a while, knowing the time is ticking down until he has to let the next patient in. Finally he comes to a decision, and rings Lestrade.

“It’s, um, it’s John.”

“Everything all right? Sherlock’s not done anything that will involve paperwork, has he?” This has become a bit of a running joke between John and Lestrade, who have worked out a conversational routine over the months, which mostly revolves around commiserating about Sherlock.

“No, I don’t think so.” John taps his fingers against his desk, working out exactly what he wants to ask. “The day Sherlock broke his ankle--tell me again what happened?”

“You read the report already, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, it’s got a bit fuzzy. Tell me again? Sorry, you’ve probably got cases on, but--”

“No, fine. It started with a robbery of an old bookshop. Seemed like a fairly amateur sort of thing--smash open the till, grab the money--but we couldn’t figure out how they got into the building. No camera footage, no evidence of tampering with camera footage, nothing. So I phoned Sherlock.”

“Did he figure it out?”

“Well, you know how he is. I suppose he did, but he never really said. Just saw the scene, got this look on his face, and rushed off. About an hour and a half hour later he sent a text with an address, no other info. And you know how it is--Sherlock tells you to be somewhere, you bring a team and some medics. Just to be on the safe side.”

John grins--he does know.

“So we got to the scene, and I saw Sherlock chasing some kid--19 or 20, looked pretty scruffy. But they were too far ahead for me to catch up, and by the time I got there Sherlock was lying in an alley with a concussion and a broken ankle, and the kid was gone. Dunno how it could have happened, Sherlock was a lot bigger. Maybe he just tripped, and was too embarrassed about it to say so.”

“I think someone else did it,” John says, voice low. “Not the kid, someone else.” He begins gathering up his belongings, preparing to go home for the day, though he’s not due to get off work until five. “Look, I hate to ask this of you, but could you give me a lift home? I don’t think I should take the tube, and I don’t exactly have a lot of trust in cabbies.”

Lestrade laughs. “No, I suppose you wouldn’t. But really, is this something I should know about? I’ll give you the lift, I’d just rather know what I’m getting into.”

“You’ll have to talk to Sherlock. I’ve just got a hunch, I don’t really know anything.”

“Right. Just let me know eventually, all right? That case is still open. Sherlock won’t give a proper report.”

“I’ll try,” John promises. He’s determined to get some kind of answer out of Sherlock.

-

Lestrade comes into the surgery to find John, who makes his excuses to Sarah (she’s got used to excuses by now). John smiles at Lestrade when he sees him. John’s not worried, or tense the way he usually is in dangerous situations. He is simply very aware that something is up, and is taking precautions accordingly.

Lestrade is driving a police car, which seems uncomfortably conspicuous to John, but also a little more secure. They get in and Lestrade doesn’t ask any questions until he starts up the car and pulls out into traffic.

“Sherlock up to something dangerous?”

John considers this. Life with Sherlock is _always_ dangerous, in at least one of several ways. “I don’t think Sherlock is up to much of anything. Except getting in to my internet history.”

“Spying on your porn viewing habits?” Lestrade asks, with a casual grin.

John’s ears turn pink. It’s not that he’s embarrassed or ashamed of watching porn. It’s just been a long time since he’s had the kind of friends or acquaintances he jokes about it with. John doubts Sherlock watches porn, or would be inclined to joke about it if he did. He pulled a disgusted but amused face the one time he found a dirty magazine under John’s bed. That time, John’s whole face had turned profoundly red.

“No, there’s nothing wrong with Sherlock. Besides a touch of cabin fever. I am a bit worried, though,” John admits.

“Isn’t that normal? Worrying about Sherlock?”

“I don’t usually worry because _he’s_ worried.”

“What’s he worried about?”

John shakes his head, wondering. “Me, I think.”

Lestrade opens his mouth and closes it again. “Look, John, I don’t want to interfere.”

“Nobody says that unless they’re about to, do they?” John asks, grinning.

“Hah! No, I suppose not. I just feel like I should say--I’ve never seen Sherlock worry about anyone. Are you sure he--”

“He asked me not to go to work this morning. For the sake of his peace of mind.”

Lestrade changes lanes in traffic and blinks out the windshield. “That wasn’t just a ploy?”

“No. I’ve seen Sherlock worried before.”

“About you?”

“Well, yeah.”

There’s a long silent pause, until a few minutes later they turn onto Baker Street and pull up in front of 221B. John unbuckles his seat belt and pauses, glancing at Lestrade.

“I’m not surprised, I suppose,” Lestrade says. “That Sherlock worries about you. I mean, you’re a bit special, aren’t you?”

John thinks about this for a long moment, and finds he can’t actually argue with the idea. John is special. He is the only person about whom someone could say to Sherlock, “I met a friend of yours,” and Sherlock would not be confused and suspicious. He leaves John notes (not always civil ones), sends John ridiculous instant messages, makes John buy ridiculous food, and folds John paper aeroplanes. Most of the time when he’s talking to John he just wants something, like tea or transportation, but there’s no denying that their relationship is somehow different than Sherlock’s relationships with other people.

John’s just not sure _how_ different.

He thanks Lestrade, gets out of the police car, and goes inside. He half expects to find Sherlock in the middle of something--shooting walls, or possibly people, or blowing things up. Instead he finds Sherlock leaning against the window frame, balanced on his good foot, looking out. Sherlock has clearly just watched John get out of the police car, and he’s probably watching Lestrade drive away as John comes in and glances around the room. “Thank you, John,” Sherlock says, still looking out the window.

“Hm?” John asks, taking off his coat and hanging it on the back of the door.

“You asked Lestrade for a lift? I assume you haven’t been solving cases without me.”

“Hardly,” John mutters, sitting down in his chair and looking at Sherlock’s profile against the brightness of the window.

“But you’re early. You were supposed to be at the surgery until five o’clock.”

“Yeah.”

Sherlock turns toward him, though his features are hard to make out with bright daylight behind him. “What changed your mind?”

“You’ve been expecting something to happen to me, haven’t you?” John asks, question for question. “That’s why you told me not to go to work. That’s why you keep calling or texting when I’m out. You’re checking up on me.”

“You did go to work. Something tipped you off, and you came home. What was it?”

“Man in the surgery. Nothing really wrong about him; he just felt off. That’s when I realized you weren’t just asking because you’re bored.”

Sherlock looks enormously pleased, grinning, and looking like he wants to bound across the room, except that his ankle prevents him. “Excellent instincts, John, always trust your instincts.”

John smiles faintly, but he’s too busy being mildly irritated that Sherlock hasn’t told him what’s going on to properly enjoy the compliment.

It’s one of those cloudy days that seem sunny anyway, the clouds too thin to block the light but too thick to show any blue. The flat is lit only by the daylight, easily bright enough but not cosy. John looks around for Sherlock’s crutches, and sees them leaning against the wall in the corner by the door. He blinks at Sherlock, standing across the room by the window, and hopes he hasn’t been straining his ankle. It’s probably a vain hope, honestly, and John fights down the urge to mention it, nag Sherlock into taking better care of himself. That’s not the conversation they are having.

John crosses his legs, folds his arms across his chest, and looks at Sherlock. He appears to be vibrating slightly, his thoughts and his pent-up energy racing in spirals and webs under his skin. Weeks of being cooped up inside, and, as John is coming to realize, weeks of being _worried_. Irritated as John is, he can’t help but feel both sick and happy that Sherlock has been worrying about _him_.

“Sherlock, how did you break your ankle?” John asks, finally.

Sherlock steps forward onto his good foot, and then clearly remembers the bad one stuck behind him, and looks at the ceiling, a frown faintly visible on his chin. He takes a deep breath, rests one hand on his hip, and turns to John.

For all the ways Sherlock talks to John--texts, instant messages, phone calls, paper planes, post-it notes--none is so eloquent as the expression now on his face. The vaguely tilted eyebrow, the pinched mouth and set jaw, God, even his _hair_. Sherlock is fed up, and inexpressibly strange even to himself, and he doesn’t just need John’s help, he _wants_ it.

“John.”

John pushes himself slowly out of his chair, and steps across the room to stand in front of Sherlock, a little too far into his personal space for anyone normal, but the normal distance for Sherlock. John takes Sherlock’s arm and pulls it around his shoulders, and helps Sherlock hop over to the sofa. He takes hold of Sherlock’s waist to lower him onto the sofa, and is slow to let go once he’s there. Sherlock makes a vague irritable noise, and John pulls back to sit down on the coffee table and look at him. He sits down on a stack of newspapers (should know to check all flat surfaces first, by now), and has to get up again to move them.

Finally settled, John looks at Sherlock and contemplates the day of the accident, and the time since.

“Shall I try making some deductions?” John asks.

Sherlock gestures, like, well, you can _try_ , but he doesn’t actually protest.

“It was someone else’s fault, your ankle. Not the kid you were chasing, someone else was there. Someone you think you should have been able to beat in a fight, which is why you don’t want to talk about it. Someone you’re worried is going to try to hurt me, next.” John always feels like an impostor when he makes deductions, like someone trying to sound knowledgeable in front of an expert. He’s pretty sure he’s right about these, though, and even if they’re not such complicated deductions like pink suitcases or green ladders, or the turn-ups on someone’s jeans, he’s a bit pleased about it.

Sherlock begins to smile, and John knows what kind of smile it is. It’s a bit infuriating, but it’s also so Sherlock that John can’t be bothered much. This is Sherlock’s version of, “oh, look at the adorable little girl wearing her mother’s shoes.”

“Very good, John. Those are barely deductions at all, but very good. You’ve only missed all the obvious things.”

John actually grins at him.

“It was Moriarty, wasn’t it?”

Sherlock’s face twists, mildly horrified and a bit shocked.

John takes a moment to feel smug, and then he punches Sherlock on the arm. “You didn’t tell me, you complete arse.” He is taken with the familiar urge to strangle Sherlock. His fingers twitch, and then he digs them into Sherlock’s arm.

They touch each other a lot. Sherlock’s injured and John’s a doctor, so there’s a good reason for that right now, but if he touched a patient in the surgery the way he touches Sherlock he’d probably be sued. Negotiating the intertwining of the doctor-patient and colleague-flatmate-friend relationships is difficult for John. His instincts as a doctor get mixed up with his instincts as a friend, as someone who always, always wants Sherlock to be _okay_. So when he touches Sherlock, sometimes it’s a measuring, diagnosing evaluation, and sometimes it’s something less clear-cut that John doesn’t really know how to think about, and sometimes it’s _both_ , which is the most confusing of all.

And no matter how it happens, John likes touching Sherlock.

Sherlock lets him. That’s the way touch goes, with Sherlock. He moves into your personal space like it doesn’t matter how far apart you are as long as you’re close enough to make deductions, but he doesn’t touch people. He doesn’t let many people touch him, but he sits still while John reaches into his inside jacket pocket for his phone (on _his_ orders), or while John examines his chest (on John’s insistence).

This is not how he reacts to John’s fingernails in his arm.

This time, he touches back. He reaches out and rests his knuckles lightly against John’s knee. Not a grip, barely a touch, but very definitely there, very much a reciprocation. Of something, anyway.

“You always do this with Moriarty,” John says. “You go off on your own, and then I wind up with a bomb strapped to my chest because you decide to offer him secret government information.”

“Your kidnapping was not, strictly speaking, my fault,” Sherlock answers, sounding sulky.

“You still might have told me what you were planning to do.”

“You would have tried to stop me.”

“Well, I would have been right. He didn’t want the Bruce-Partington plans anyway, did he? Besides, when has anyone ever managed to stop you doing anything?”

Sherlock sniffs. “You probably could have.”

John blinks, and clears his throat around a jumble of completely nonsense words. He decides, in a slightly panicked moment, to switch subjects. “So Moriarty was there. Did he trip you, or what? How did you bruise your chest?”

Sherlock’s eyes drift, downward across John’s chest and onto his own fingers on John’s knee. “It was a message, I suppose. He ought to have written a note on my cast, that would have been suitably childish.”

“A message for what? Who?”

“For me, for you, it doesn’t matter.”

“If it was for me it didn’t work, since _you_ never told me about it.”

Sherlock gives him a quelling look. “He used snipers again, meant to keep me from fighting back. That trick’s getting a bit old. Do I really need to continue?”

“What was the point? The message.”

“Wouldn’t you rather foil his plans by not knowing?”

“Sherlock, that isn’t the bloody point.” John breaks away, getting off the table and out of Sherlock’s space, stepping towards the door. “I’m not going to just follow you around blindly if you never tell me anything. You know why Moriarty hurt you, so there’s no point in not telling me.” He clenches his hands into fist against his hips and glares. “You’ve been leaving me messages for weeks, there’s no reason you couldn’t have thrown this one in with the lot.”

“It isn’t that simple.”

“Are you implying you think I wouldn’t understand it?” John asks, practically shouting. He isn’t even sure why he’s so angry, but the urge to touch Sherlock, to shake some sense into him, to shake him into seeing the world in a way John understands, is overwhelming.

“Don’t be stupid, John,” Sherlock says, mouth pinched tight against his teeth, fingers digging into the couch cushions.

“Are you seriously telling me I’m being stupid for asking if you think I’m stupid?”

Sherlock’s mouth twitches, not like he’s suppressing laughter, but like he’s suppressing the need to say something cutting. “This is a ridiculous argument; you’re going in circles.”

“So tell me what the message was!”

Sherlock stands, his balance slightly wobbly. “He threatened you. That was his message. He hurt me so we’d know he could hurt you.”

John backs away. His back thuds into the door jamb, and he’s thankful for the solid wall grounding him, keeping him from doing anything he might regret. “You didn’t think I should know that?” His voice is a cold, flat blank, and he’s looking at Sherlock but barely seeing him.

“John.”

“You let me go to work, you let me go shopping. You let me go all over London, and you never told me I was in danger. Were you _trying_ to get me killed?”

Sherlock doesn’t answer, and John’s too caught in the moment to have any idea why.

“I’m going to bed,” John says shortly. “Maybe I’ll talk to you in the morning.”

He turns away and climbs the stairs. When he gets to his room he paces, trying to work off some of his pent-up anger, still too physical for him to calm down. He digs his fingers into his own thigh, needing something cathartic, something better than this back and forth across the floor.

Eventually he sits down on the bed, taking deep breaths. It’s only four-thirty in the afternoon, far too early to go to sleep, but John isn’t hungry and his computer is sitting on the table in the lounge. There’s no way he’s going downstairs again (too much like a surrender, too likely to end badly), and there’s nothing else to do, so he pulls off his shoes, strips off the rest of his clothes down to his underwear, and curls up in bed.

He’s surprised when the feeling of the sheets against his skin calms him down, when his bed is so comfortable he begins to feel drowsy.

He will be surprised, when he thinks about it later, that he falls asleep and does not dream of watery light, or pale skin.

-

John wakes again in darkness. He rolls over and takes several deep breaths, lying in his bed under the window and watching the amber sweep of headlights across the walls. He feels sweaty and nervous, not like waking from a bad dream but like waking from a deep sleep and remembering today is the day of a long-hoped-for date.

He bites his lip, stretches his toes out through the sheets, and wishes he wouldn’t keep thinking about this in those terms. Certainly not while he’s still angry.

His anger has changed in the night, less rage now and more hurt. The desire to pummel Sherlock has faded, but John still wants to push him against a wall and make him see he can’t do the things he does. John lets Sherlock get away with a lot, but he won’t let him get away with this.

Sherlock lies to everyone--pretends to be normal, pretends to be innocent, pretends to be helpful, pretends not to care. To John, he lies by omission.

He doesn’t _bother_ to mention things.

John kicks the blankets away and looks at the digital clock on his bedside table. 2:12 AM. He’s been asleep almost ten hours, and he’s perfectly awake now, alert and ready to make something happen. He gets up, puts on a clean t-shirt, and goes downstairs.

Sherlock is sitting in his armchair. The telly is on, some late-night rubbish programme, muted. Sherlock is clearly still wearing his pyjamas, as he has been ever since the accident, but he’s put his coat on over everything and is practically curled up inside it, as though huddling for warmth. It’s not cold--John, in shirt and pants, is perfectly warm. John takes a moment to think about how Sherlock wouldn’t be so cold all the time if he were less skinny, but he shakes off the thought.

John leans in the doorway, looking at Sherlock.

He remembers, every time he starts over-analysing himself, that he has a broad capacity to willfully overlook things. He was completely unaware that Sherlock was preoccupied with something until Sherlock had started telling him not to go to work. Even then, he had overlooked the depth of Sherlock’s worry. In the midst of his anger, he’d barely seen Sherlock, been oblivious to his reactions.

Now he’s looking, there’s nothing to see. Sherlock’s face is a blank.

“Hey,” John says, soft enough for two AM but loud enough to catch Sherlock’s attention. Theoretically. Sherlock doesn’t respond.

“Just going to ignore me?” John asks, crossing his arms.

“You said ‘in the morning’. I’ve got at least four hours before I’m obliged to speak to you.” He glances at John and glances away, dismissive, and his voice is sharp.

“I’m surprised you feel obliged to talk to me at all.”

“Path of least resistance,” Sherlock says distastefully.

“You usually like resistance,” John points out. “It makes more bother for other people. Anyway, it’s morning for me. I’ve been asleep since half past four.”

Sherlock raises one eyebrow, but nothing else moves. “I know you believe I’m nocturnal, but even I know it is the middle of the night. Go back to bed; you clearly have nothing better to do with your time. Waste away, lying in bed, _sleeping_.”

“Shut up, Sherlock,” John says, more forcefully than he usually would. He crosses the room and sits down in a chair at the table behind Sherlock, who is forced to turn around to face him. Out the window the street is dim and empty.

“Do you know why it bothers me when you lie?” John asks, a little sharply.

“I never lied,” Sherlock answers, affronted.

“Oh, that right there,” John snaps. “That’s what bothers me. Damn it, Sherlock, did no one ever explain the concept of a lie of omission to you?”

Sherlock stares back at him, impassive, clearly deducing. “No, if I lied--and it doesn’t matter to you whether or not I did, only that you believe I did--if I lied, it bothers you because you trust me. You trust me despite your better judgment, and it bothers you when I disappoint your trust. Not because I’ve disappointed you, but because you’re disappointed in yourself for your irrational trust. Which is ridiculous, because people lie all the time. People lie about everything from whether they remembered to buy milk to whether they are faithful to their spouses. The vast majority of those lies have nothing to do with trust.”

“None of that was what I was going to say,” John points out.

“Then you are also lying by omission.” John tucks that assertion into the back of his mind and tries not to prod it. “What, John?” Sherlock continues. “Why am I obligated to tell you everything?”

“It’s not that. You’re allowed to have some secrets, obviously. Everyone does. You don’t have to tell me everything, you just have to tell me when it’s about me. Communication, all right?”

“We communicate all the time, in case you haven’t noticed.”

John picks Sherlock’s phone off the table and waves it at him. “Through text, sure. Through post-it notes. Doesn’t count.”

“It’s perfectly possible to sum things up in 140 characters. Most people say far too much, when what they mean is really very simple.”

John sets Sherlock’s phone down again, very softly. “Fine. Here’s what I mean: You put me in danger because you didn’t tell me something important. You can’t do that.”

“You see?” Sherlock says. “That was less than 140 characters.”

John glares. “I’m not done. You can’t do that unless you have an extremely good reason which you think--after lengthy consideration--I would approve. If you had a reason like that, I think you should tell me about it now.”

“John, you would have been in danger whether you knew about it or not.”

“You just decided I shouldn’t go to work.”

“What?”

This has been bothering John, and now he has the opportunity to ask it. “You let me go to work before. Yesterday you asked me to stay home. What changed?”

“It’s been too long. No doubt that was his intention--to make us wait, to prolong the anticipation and thus increase the fear.”

“And you fell for it?”

“No, of course not. I simply trusted my instincts that something would happen today.”

John scoffs, suspecting Sherlock’s “instincts” were mostly influenced by his impatience. “Fine. But how could you know for sure he wouldn’t do something, before? If you were expecting him to wait, why couldn’t he have known that, and done the opposite? No matter how you spin it, Sherlock, you put me in danger.”

He watches Sherlock, who tucks his coat back around himself and then looks up at John. “You’ve not been unprotected.”

“So you had Mycroft watching me?”

Sherlock waves a dismissive hand. “Oh, he does that anyway.”

“You ever notice your brother’s a creep?” John mutters, suppressing a strangled noise.

“Frequently. But his voyeuristic tendencies are occasionally useful. He has dealt with the man you saw yesterday already.”

“So, what, has he got somebody trailing me ready to shoot my attackers?”

Sherlock wrinkles his nose. “I prefer not to ask questions. I let Mycroft make the arrangements, and take my own measures in the meantime.”

"Your own measures? You can't leave the flat, what have you--Hang on, is that why you keep texting me about nothing, and phoning while I’m shopping? Are you checking up on me?”

Sherlock eyes John, possibly checking the sincerity of the question. “You didn’t really think I had a use for gherkins, prawns, and a meat tenderiser, did you?”

“So you had me waste money buying ridiculous things, just so you could make sure I wasn’t dead?”

“It wasn’t a waste. Well, the meat tenderiser, perhaps, but I’m sure it will come in handy somehow. The prawns are still in the freezer, we can eat them for dinner."

John thinks back to the other things Sherlock made him buy, and remembers the lubricant. He wonders if Sherlock expects _that_ to come in handy. Sherlock watches him expectantly, no doubt aware that he is not finished with this conversation, and John pushes the thought to the back of his mind. He scrubs his hands over his face, and rests his elbows on the table. "Look," he says, "it's Moriarty, isn't it? As criminals go, he's sort of special. For us. I mean, most cases are your business, and I just tag along." Sherlock looks almost as if he wants to protest this assessment, but the expression on John's face seems to quiet him. "But Moriarty has kidnapped me, and he's hurt you, and he's tried to blow us both up. And we--well, we agreed to die rather than let him escape, didn't we? So he's our business. And we should deal with him together."

Sherlock watches John contemplatively. It's almost the same expression he has when he's deducing--fascinated, urgent--but softer. John bites his lip, wondering if he's given something away he shouldn't, if he's said more than he means, or means more than he's aware of.

"I was trying to protect you," Sherlock says.

"Christ. Please don't. I appreciate it, but--God, I want to strangle you." And he does. He feels that physical urgency in the tips of his fingers again, the desire to shake Sherlock until Sherlock understands. The knowledge that trying to change Sherlock’s mind is nearly always futile only increases the frustration, but John also knows that Sherlock would not be Sherlock if he saw things as John does.

Sherlock smiles, a faint, impish smile, and John....

John still wants to grab Sherlock by the shoulders, to leave marks there, but not to make him see. John wants, with an urgency he's never recognized before, to press himself against Sherlock, less angry and violent, and more instinctive. The touch of violence is still there, but it's more...more passion, than violence. John swallows painfully. "You must have known not telling me I was in danger wasn't going to protect me," he says.

“You may not believe this, John, but I am not _always_ rational,” Sherlock says.

“Those post-it notes were pretty mad, yeah."

John wants to stick his hands into Sherlock's hair and press his palms against Sherlock's back. He knew Sherlock had a possessive, protective streak, an _Are you all right?_ streak, but the times when it is apparent are few and far between. He's never seen Sherlock admit it. He pines, momentarily, for their post-it note communication, when it was easier to understand what Sherlock was saying, or to ignore it if he didn't understand.

“John.”

John hears the dark tone in Sherlock’s voice, almost a warning, mostly a wanting. It’s strange and familiar at the same time, a mixture of the voice Sherlock uses when he’s arguing with John over something stupid like the telly, fond and slightly frustrated, and a more serious voice. More like the voice Sherlock used to ask, “Are you all right?”

John's not all right. He's a bit panicked and very frustrated and a little hopeful. The man who can shoot a serial killer through a window and then go out for Chinese can't have a simple conversation with his flatmate.

"What?" John asks, hoarse.

"I'm sorry."

It's the apology that tips hope into near certainty. Sherlock never apologises. John stands, pushing his chair back, and steps forward to lean against the arm of Sherlock’s chair.

"Sherlock, will you let me--?"

Sherlock narrows his eyes, and then reaches out to take hold of John’s hip and pull him in. Looming over Sherlock is strange. Sherlock’s fingers slip upwards, underneath John’s shirt, rubbing against the smooth skin just above the waistband of John’s pants. John takes a deep breath, and slides his hand against the back of Sherlock’s neck, just brushing his hair, just creeping under his collar.

"I seduced you with post-it notes," Sherlock mutters, looking up at him, a bit amused, a bit wondering.

John snorts. "No, really. The post-it notes have got to go.” He grins and leans in.

“Hmm,” Sherlock hums, mouth barely an inch away from John’s, their breath mixing together, warm.

John lurches across the last inch, digging his fingertips into Sherlock's shoulder, pressing the knuckles of his other hand across Sherlock's collarbone. Their lips slide together and John's teeth catch, and then Sherlock's tongue creeps forward and curls against John's upper lip, and it is all just as tactile as John has ever wanted. Just as good as strangulation or pummeling. Much better than beating sense into Sherlock is the attempt to kiss the sense out of him. John leans forward, bracing his weight on Sherlock's shoulders, letting Sherlock hold him up.

After the post-it notes, the texts, the instant messages, the phone calls, touch is a new kind of communication. More subjective, maybe, but more real. John's breath stutters against Sherlock's mouth, and says everything.


End file.
